A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
